Prank War
by Eponymous Rose
Summary: Someone's been pranking the Nein, with surprising effectiveness. Someone who isn't Jester. It's not that she's jealous or anything. It just seems like this is the kind of thing they could be working on together, and anyway, why wouldn't this someone come to her for advice? One thing's for sure: whoever they are, they've crossed the wrong detective.


"You're a fantastic detective," Nott says, which is both super unhelpful and super true. "You'll figure it out," she adds, which is still unhelpful, but definitely more of a 'maybe' on the truth scale.

Jester scratches her chin, staring at the perfectly placed bird's nest teetering alarmingly on the top of Caduceus' head. "And you're sure you didn't put it up there yourself?"

He blinks. "Well, no, I didn't. I feel like I'd remember something like that. I just fell asleep leaning against a tree, and when I woke up, here it was." He glances up, half-crosseyed, at the nest and its three perfectly pink eggs. "Sorry, guys."

"How about let's put the bird's nest back in the tree where it belongs," Fjord says, and Jester turns to squint at him suspiciously. He stares back, and the exasperation in his eyes seems pretty innocent, really. Another dead end.

"It's evidence," Nott points out.

"Definitely evidence." But the image floats to Jester's mind, unbidden, of a momma bird frantic with worry... "But no. Put it back, I guess."

Beau marches over, snatches the nest from Caduceus' head, and leaps up to hook one arm over the lowest branch of the big tree overhead. "I'm honestly not convinced this isn't some sort of longer scam you're running," she calls, nonchalantly balancing on the end of a narrow-looking branch and bending to place the nest in a safer locale.

"The Traveler works in mysterious ways," Caleb murmurs behind her.

Jester heaves a sigh, moving up to offer Beau a hand down from the last branch. "I wish, you guys! This is good stuff! I just don't understand why someone keeps doing all this cool stuff without telling me! The dick-shaped scuffs on the cave wall. The little tunnel dug around our campsite that filled up with water overnight and turned into a moat. The thing with Nott's flask-"

"We don't talk about the thing with Nott's flask," Nott says, primly.

"I'm saying, the Traveler loves this!"

Beau shrugs. "So why not ask the Traveler?"

Jester flings her arms up, then flops back into the grass with a groan. "He just laughs when I ask him!" Even now, she feels the warmth of someone else's amusement running up and down her spine. It's really irritating, and she kind of hates that it bothers her so much.

Nott has been tapping one finger against her lips, thoughtfully. "Hey. Hey, what if we did, like, a proper interrogation? Just sat down and went through each candidate, one by one?"

Jester props herself up on her elbows. "Could we do that?"

"We are on a bit of a timetable-" Caleb says.

Beau snorts. "Gotta be honest, that sounds fuckin' hilarious. I'm in."

"Our pay is time-sensitive-"

Fjord folds his arms. "Only if Nott gets interrogated as well. I don't trust her in this as far as I can throw her."

"The farmer was rather insistent that-"

Nott actually sticks out her tongue. "You can't throw me at all."

"Listen, if we-"

Fjord straightens, grinning. "That was the idea, yes. That's how little I trust you."

"Maybe we should-"

"I accept the premise of this self-burn but not its result." Nott turns to Jester. "I'll submit to your draconian questioning, if only to clear my good name!"

"I don't think-"

Jester claps her hands. "Perfect! Let's settle down here and set up an interrogation room. Caleb, can you make some really bright light I can shine in people's eyes?"

Caleb winds down, fumbling over the last of his protests. "Okay," he says. "So this is happening."

* * *

Caleb sits with surprising good grace, given his earlier protests, and blinks politely at her while she tries to figure out the best way forward. "Do you-" she starts, then scowls. "Aw man, the sun came out. Can you make the light brighter?"

"Ah, sort of?" He waggles his fingers a moment, and the light behind Jester flickers. "Better?"

She glares at him; belatedly, he puts on an exaggerated squint, as though staring into a blinding light. "It'll do," she says, and decides to try to put him off-balance. "Why did you draw dicks around the campsite?"

"I didn't," he says.

She pauses, but a great interrogator never gets sidetracked by such small things as inconvenient facts. "Well, what about the moat around the campfire?"

"Not me, either."

"Oh." She tries another glare, but he only squints back. "Okay, Widogast. You win this round. But we might have more questions for you. Don't leave town."

He says, "I wouldn't dream of it," and Jester decides not to comment on the unnerving sincerity in his words.

* * *

"You may be wondering why I've brought you here today." Jester leans in, her shadow eclipsing Caleb's little bobbing light in what she hopes is a properly ominous manner.

Beau yawns. "Not really, no. You... you kind of spelled it all out."

"I always knew you were clever," Jester says, pacing slowly, stroking an imagined beard. "But are you-" She whips around. "-too clever?!"

Beau shrugs. "Honestly, I'd rather be an accessory after the fact than the main perpetrator."

Jester deflates. "Oh."

Another shrug, this one vaguely apologetic. "Almost as much fun, but a shorter prison sentence. You know how it goes."

"Oh."

"Sorry. But if you find who did all this without you, I'll beat 'em up for you. With you, if you like."

Jester considers this generous offer. "I mean, I think it's probably going to be one of our friends, Beau."

Beau cracks her knuckles, grinning, and Jester can't help but smile back.

* * *

Caduceus sits down a little too eagerly, Jester thinks, grinning broadly, which isn't the proper attitude for an interrogation at all. "Oh, this is interesting. Okay, I think I'm ready. What are you going to ask me?"

Jester raises a scolding finger. "I'll be the one asking questions here!"

"Yes, I-" Caduceus scratches his beard. "Isn't that what I said?"

"Another question! You just don't learn." Jester leans in. Caduceus leans back a little, politely giving her more space. "Did you or did you not conspire to scheme to plot a seditious conniving of treacherous, um. Treachery?"

He gives that one some thought. "That doesn't sound like something I'd do." He shifts. "This is awkward, but I've never done an interrogation like this before. Is that the right thing for me to say?"

"You'd probably protest your own innocence, then break down at the most dramatic possible moment. Probably."

"Oh." He gets a bit of a worried look on his face. "That sounds like a lot. I guess I could try?"

She glares a moment longer, then sighs. "I guess you wouldn't put a bird's nest on your own head."

He brightens. "Oh, is that what this is about? No, that wasn't me."

Reaching for a properly interrogatory closing, Jester blurts, "But maybe sleep a little lighter and notice next time?"

"That seems fair." He schools his features to a semblance of seriousness. "Can I go now, uh, copper?"

Jester claps her hands together. "Oh, you have been listening! You're good at this, Caduceus!"

He beams. "Thanks."

* * *

This one, Jester thinks, is going to be a tough nut to crack. Start cool. Cool and chill. No problem. "It's no secret that you're basically positioned to learn how to be a criminal mastermind, being half of the greatest detective agency of all time."

Nott sneers. "The same could be said of you."

"Where were you on the night of the..." Jester pauses, doing the math in her head. "The night of the other night?"

Nott makes a show of thinking it over, then springs to her feet. "But the same could be asked of you!"

Jester gasps, putting a hand to her chest. "You're accusing me? Your own partner?"

From somewhere behind them, she hears Fjord muttering, "This is... such a good use of our time."

"Though it breaks my heart to do it, I must! I must stand for justice!" Nott's pose is straight out of a melodrama. Jester applauds briefly, then goes back to glowering in order to better represent her agony of the soul. "If I can't trust you, and you can't trust me, who can trust who?"

Jester blinks. "Wait, is it whom?"

"Whom?" Nott thinks about it for a second. "Youm."

"Well, you know whom you can trust. Youm can trust? It's me, Nott! I'm your partner!"

"Can I? Can I really? Or can we even trust... ourselves?"

"Okay," Fjord says, marching between them and waving his hands. "Okay. Nott wouldn't do this without roping you in, Jester, and we all know it. I'm up next."

Wiping a single artful tear from her cheek, Jester sighs and steels herself for the next interrogation.

* * *

"No," Fjord says. "For the third time, it wasn't me doing the moat, or the dicks, or the nest, or the thing with Nott's flask-"

A shrill voice, somewhere beyond the circle of interrogation. "We don't talk about the thing with the flask!"

"Regardless, it wasn't me. And you can cast Zone of Truth on me if you want proof."

Jester blinks. "Oh. Right. That. Wow, that probably would've saved some time, huh?"

Fjord groans, rubbing at his face. "Can we just chalk this up to a mysterious and unexplained phenomenon and move on with our lives? Unless I wake up with my bootlaces all cut tomorrow morning, I'm not going to go around accusing our family of-" He pauses, like he wasn't quite expecting that word to come out, then shrugs and keeps talking. "-of doing weird things for no particular reason. That's pretty much all we do!"

Jester sighs defeat, watching as Caleb's interro-globe vanishes from thin air. "Okay, okay. I just... I guess I just couldn't figure out why someone would do cool stuff and not invite me." And, more than anything, she kind of hates the way her voice goes weird and small at the end.

His exasperation softens, and he glances over her shoulder to where the others are watching. "Look, Jester, whatever this joker's doing, they're obviously building up to something big and ridiculous and fun, and that's got your name all over it. I'd see it as an homage. A tribute. Would the Traveler set you up to be hurt by something like that if it didn't have a good payoff?"

Jester inhales slowly, because professional interrogators emphatically do not sniffle. "No. He wouldn't."

"Well, there you go. We'll see how it goes. Okay?"

With a heavy sigh, Jester lets the interrogator persona drop from her shoulders like an ill-fitting cloak. "Okay. Let's get back to work."

* * *

That night, though, Jester lies awake, watching the stars wheel overhead and thinking about what it feels like to be missing out on something big, to have to just know some big party's out there somewhere and let it go on without knowing when or even if you'd get invited. She figures maybe that's what Caduceus keeps talking about, faith and everything else. Maybe that's the Traveler's brand of faith: having to trust that someday you'll get let in on the joke.

She thinks faith kind of sucks, sometimes.

With a sigh, she rolls onto her side, watching Frumpkin make his nightly rounds, hunting down mice and pouncing on leaves and doing the cat-stuff he does when Caleb's asleep—which he is now, apparently, judging from the faint snoring over on his end of the campsite.

But... wait. She squints, taking in the scene, and feels a giant grin threatening to break across her face.

Across from her, Frumpkin is hunkered down over Fjord's boots, industriously biting through the laces.

"No way," she breathes, softly, and two eyes glowing with reflected firelight, and maybe a little fey light of their own, flash up to meet hers. Jester winks. One of the faint lights flickers out in response.

This time, the warmth of the Traveler's laughter is a deep comfort that follows her into delighted dreams.


End file.
